International Development Events

In the past few years, natural and manmade disasters including Superstorm Sandy, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and the Boston Marathon bombing have highlighted the growing need for communities and societies to be resilient in the face of unexpected and constantly changing challenges. Join us, the Rockefeller Foundation, Thomas Lovejoy of the UN Foundation, and select authors to discuss how urban communities and industrial enterprises can “survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent change and uncertainty.”

“There is no magic bullet or solution to resolving climate change quickly,” said the Population Reference Bureau’s Jason Bremner at the Wilson Center on October 28. “Our next 100 years will be far different from the last 100 or the last 1000…and it has become clear that nations will have to pursue many strategies in order to reduce emissions, build resilience, and adapt.”

With UN demographers more certain than ever that global population will reach between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century, the challenge of building a sustainable future seems daunting. But according to Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Vienna-based Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital, these projections miss one crucial variable: increasing levels of education.

Water is a key ingredient for peace, especially in the Middle East. The Jordan River, which forms the border between Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and Jordan, is central to the interrelated political and environmental challenges facing the region. Addressing these challenges requires not only high-level diplomacy but also direct, people-to-people engagement, which can form lasting relationships that go beyond water, said experts at the Wilson Center on October 17.

This seminar will present the 2014 Perspectives on Global Development report which focuses on the global economic shift to developing countries and stresses how boosting productivity growth can meet the middle-income challenge, giving detailed comparative analysis of productivity levels and changes over time.

Japan and India are the two largest democracies in the most populous and dynamic region in the world. Join us in a discussion about prospects for a strategic partnership between the two countries and how closer ties will impact relations with their neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region.

Development and poverty reduction are inextricably linked to the water, energy and security nexus in Africa. There was some consensus that the impact of climate variability and extreme climate events depends not only on the severity of the crisis, but also on the vulnerability of the affected population – which is correlated with the level of development along with governance and other socio-cultural factors. Just as poverty can put communities at an increased level of vulnerability, so can sustainable development lead to improvements in climate-resilience and human security.

In July, thousands of people attended the 20th International AIDS Conference and the 2014 Girls Summit to work towards an AIDS-free generation and ending child and forced marriage. But such attention is rare; by and large, these girls are invisible to development efforts.